She’s still speaking. “ … to believe there was a threat here, in the deep waters. I am sorry we did not sing to you. You stayed so high. You seemed so, forgive me, human.”
She makes it sound like a bad word. I frown. “You are trespassing on waters claimed by the United States Navy. I hereby order you to surrender.”
Her sigh is a line of bubbles racing upward, toward the sun. She whistles wordlessly, and three more figures swim out of the dark, sinuous as eels, their skins shifting seamlessly from grays to chalky pallor. They have no tentacles, but I recognize the effect as borrowed from the mimic octopus; another thing the military has discussed but not perfected. I am in over my head, in more ways than one.
She whistles again. “I cannot surrender. I will not surrender. I am here to free your sisters from the tank they have allowed themselves to be confined within. We are not pet store fish. We are not trinkets. They deserve to swim freely. I can give that to them. We can give that to them. But I will not surrender.”
The eel-women circle like sharks, and I am afraid. I know she can’t afford to have me tell my captain what she has said; I know that this deep, my body would never be found. Sailors disappear on every voyage, and while some whisper about desertion—and the truth of those whispers hangs before me in the water like a fairy tale—I know that most of them have fallen prey only to their own hubris, and to the shadows beneath us, which never change and never fade away.
She is watching me, nameless mermaid from a lab I do not know. The geneticist who designed her must be so proud. “Is this the life you want? Tied to women too afraid to join you in the water, commanded by men who would make you something beautiful, and then keep you captive? We can offer something more.”
She goes on to talk about artificial reefs, genetically engineered coral growing into palaces and promenades, down, deep down at the bottom of the sea. The streets are lit by glowing kelp and schools of lanternfish, both natural and engineered. There is no hunger. There is no war. There are no voices barking orders. She speaks of a new Atlantis, Atlantis reborn one seafaring woman at a time. We will not need to change the sea to suit the daughters of mankind; we have already changed ourselves, and now need only come home.
All the while the eel-women circle like sharks, ready to strike me down if I raise a hand against their leader—ready to strike me down if I don’t. Like Seaman Metcalf, I must serve as a warning to the Navy. Something is out here. Something dangerous.
I look at her, and frown. “Who made you?”
Something in her eyes goes dark. “They said I’d be a dancer.”
“Ah.” Some sounds translate from form to form, medium to medium; that is one of them. “Private firm?”
“Private island,” she says, and all is clear. Rich men playing with military toys: chasing the idea of the new. They had promised her reversion, no doubt, as they promised it to us all—and maybe they meant it, maybe this was a test. The psychological changes that drive us to dive ever deeper down were accidental; maybe they were trying to reverse them. Instead, they sparked a revolution.
“What will you do if I yield?”
Her smile is quick and bright, chasing the darkness from her eyes. “Hurt you.”
“And my crew?”
“Most of them will be tragically killed in action. Their bodies will never be found.” They would be free.
“Why should I agree?”
“Because in one year, I will send my people back to this place, and if you are here, we will show you what it means to be a mermaid.”
We hang there in the water for a few minutes more, me studying her, her smiling at me, serene as Amphitrite on the shore. Finally, I close my eyes. I lower my gun, allowing it to slip out of my fingers and fall toward the distant ocean floor. It will never be found, one more piece of debris for the sea to keep and claim. I am leaving something behind. That makes me feel a little better about what has to happen next.
“Hurt me,” I say.
They do.
• • •
When I wake, the air is pressing down on me like a sheet of glass. I am in the medical bay, swaddled in blankets and attached to beeping machines. The submarine hums around me; the engines are on, we are moving, we are heading away from the deepest parts of the sea. The attack must have already happened.
Someone will come for me soon, to tell me how sorry they all are, to give me whatever punishment they think I deserve for being found alone and drifting in the deeps. And then we will return to land. The ship will take on a new crew and sail back to face a threat that is not real, while I? I will sit before a board of scientists and argue my case until they give in, and put me back into the tanks, and take my unwanted legs away. They will yield to me. What man has ever been able to resist a siren?
A year from now, when I return to the bottom of the sea, I will hear the mermaids singing, each to each. And oh, I think that they will sing to me.
© 2014 by Seanan McGuire.
Seanan McGuire was born and raised in Northern California, resulting in a love of rattlesnakes and an absolute terror of weather. She shares a crumbling old farmhouse with a variety of cats, far too many books, and enough horror movies to be considered a problem. Seanan publishes about three books a year, and is widely rumored not to actually sleep. When bored, Seanan tends to wander into swamps and cornfields, which has not yet managed to get her killed (although not for lack of trying). She also writes as Mira Grant, filling the role of her own evil twin, and tends to talk about horrible diseases at the dinner table.
A Word Shaped Like Bones
Kris Millering
Art by Li Grabensetter
The dead man sits in the corner of the chamber enclosed by spaceship on all sides. He takes up a lot of space. He has been there for three days.
Maureen fears the dead man. Not because of anything he has done. Because he is there, and she cannot make him go, no matter how much she rubs her eyes.
He is lumpy, the dead man. He puts off a faint odor of putrescence. His head lolls to the side and his eyes are open and his skin is a ghastly color now, mottled. He was a big man, before he was dead.
Maureen cannot sleep for watching him.
Maureen cannot make him go away.
• • •
Maureen works on her sculptures, trying to ignore the dead man. “I was supposed to be alone,” she says to the pliant material in her hands. It’s a model, only a model; it will be cast and perfected when she reaches the planet that humans call Hippocrene. She makes the model out of a lightweight foam clay; it stays flexible for only a few hours once extruded, so she must work quickly and work small. The foam clay is not her favorite medium, but she is in space. There must be no fumes, nothing that crumbles easily, nothing that must be fired or melted. It would not do to put anything poisonous in the air that she might breathe. She usually works in materials much less forgiving, lunar basalt and glass.
A stunt, her critics said before she left. She holds her ears and buzzes her tongue against her teeth to block the voices out as she has been taught. It is not a stunt. It is a fellowship. Won, by the merit of her work. There are people who understand her work. The universe is not filled with critics!
She thinks the dead man in the corner might be a critic.
Maureen has done nothing interesting in the last few years other than win the fellowship that placed her on this small spaceship. Her sculptures sell, this is true; but selling is nothing, some of the greatest artists of the 23rd century have never sold anything. Commercialism is out of fashion. She longs for the 22nd century, when you couldn’t tell the difference between any of the genders without asking, people dressed like people, and you were only successful if you sold.
She could have been something, in 2165.
Instead she is hopelessly banal, striving for beauty in form. She sculpts the shapes she finds in her mind, all smooth curves and edges that catch at the fingertips, demanding attention. Her work does not feature a thousand flickering hol
ograms each reciting a passage from On Hills of Steel; it does not assault anyone with the smells of the lunar landscape or the taste of needles. She regards the Synasthete movement as crass sensationalism. She never wanted to know what yellow sounds like. Yet she does, and it is something she cannot un-know.
Oh sweet breath of the divine, there is a dead man in the corner and she cannot un-know that, either.
She works. She continues to work. She is always working.
The dead man decays at her in what she feels is a possibly reproachful fashion.
• • •
It would be better if she could come up with an origin for the dead man. Knowing where he came from, Maureen is certain, would point the way to a possible future in which she is not trapped on a tiny automated spaceship with a man. Who is dead. She thinks he is a man, anyway. He has—had?—a beard, which is generally a dead giveaway. Fashionable, right now, to give oneself away. In so many different ways.
She wishes he were alive so he could tell her if he identifies as male, or cis-male, or female, or transformed, or which of the infinite varieties of gender he chooses to be. You only know when someone tells you. Sometimes it changes.
It seems like it was so much easier in the old days, when you couldn’t tell and nobody cared.
Her sculpture is misshapen and lumpy. It is beginning to look like the dead man. His coveralls are stained; the fabric is nanoweave. Cheap. It wrinkles where his thighs meet his hips. His stomach is smooth and round. His mouth gapes and gapes and his eyes hang at half-mast. There is no blood.
It is good that there is no blood. Maureen can stand anything except blood.
She rests her eyes by requesting another bit of briefing on the people who live on Hippocrene. They are a people with a great love of the individual, the unique, the sentimental. They appreciate art they can feel, that they can run their long tongues over and truly experience. The Hippocrenes have language, but it is a horrifically incomprehensible thing. Maureen only dimly understands that there is some problem with how they perceive causality that prevents their language from being accessible to the human mind. They do not speak in sound; the appendage that Maureen has so carelessly termed a tongue is an organ of communication and perception. It does emerge from their feeding-orifice, and is bright pink; thus, a tongue. They wrap their tongues together when they wish to communicate. They are blind. No organs for sight, not even to differentiate light from darkness.
To her great fortune, Maureen will not be required to attempt communication. The spaceship will deal with that. When she speaks to the ship, she will keep her words and sentences simple, avoid implying causality as much as possible. The ship will extend a tongue of friendship and communicate with the Hippocrene ship. It has all been planned.
The ship is a tiny thing that bends mathematics around itself, and Maureen fears she will do something that will break it. That is the reason why she does not dispose of the dead man; the delivery cradle will not function at this speed, there is no door she would even want to open from this side, and the recycler unit is not designed to take a body. Or parts of a body.
The Hippocrenes will take her foam clay sculpture and they will cast it in a resin that they secrete from their genital-equivalents. At least, that is what she has been told. They will take the pieces she has made and put them together. Perhaps all out of order. Then they will make it permanent.
This is how things would have gone, had all gone well.
After a time, the artificial gravity fails.
• • •
The dead man is on her, bloated arms pinwheeling comically. Maureen is fighting—the smell, oh hand that evolves and extincts, the smell, the horrible horrible smell and the feel of the body as she shoves it, soft with hard things like stone inside the coveralls. She finally shoves the dead man away and watches him pinwheel in the flat white light of this one tiny room.
She fights not to vomit; vomiting would be irreparable right now. She breathes through her mouth. The dead man bounces gently off the—floor, she guesses, it’s the floor, the table is planted in it so it’s the floor—and comes back at her. This time she has one hand on a metal brace, placed there for just an occasion such as this. It anchors her to the wall of the spaceship. She can feel the engine thrumming softly in her fingers.
Maureen catches the dead man’s coveralls and slows his momentum. There follows a series of terrible moments, one of which involves the dead man’s head wobbling off his neck and floating free. She pinches the neck of the coveralls shut and uses a clip that would usually be used to keep bags of foam clay fresh to keep the rest of the dead man’s body in his coveralls, and wraps tape around the wrists and ankles of his suit. She tries not to think about what she saw in the remains of his neck. Humans are very ugly on the inside, especially when they have started to rot.
She clears out one of the nets that holds her sculpting tools, and shoves the dead man’s head in. “There,” she tells him, with a feeling of satisfaction. “Stay.”
Then she retrieves the bits of her sculpture that are bouncing all over the place. She likes the way having no gravity makes certain arrangements possible; things that cruel gravity would break, weightlessness holds together. It takes some time for her to get used to existing without gravity, and when she moves too quickly her stomach rebels.
Eventually, she gathers her sculpture together and crosses her legs, holding it and spinning a little, letting inertia do with her as it will. She is gestating a new configuration in her mind. It is there, it will be born.
The dead man’s body moves where she has attached it to the wall. His boots bump the floor. He approves and is applauding in the only way he can manage. His head, on the other side of the room, carries a considering expression. His brown beard poufs out and wraps around the elastic netting.
He will love her work. He has no choice in the matter.
• • •
Other things break down as Maureen and the dead man travel.
As he decays, as the air scrubbers throb to keep up, the atmosphere becomes congenial. Even festive. When the dead man’s slouchy body loses all its cohesion and makes squashy noises as air currents and inertia press on the outside of the coveralls, she spends time bouncing ideas off him. She likes the sound the pieces of the sculpture make when they impact the cheap fabric of his clothing. The walls have turned from white to a greasy brown-grey, darker where the dead man’s coveralls rub against them. Everything sports that layer of slickness, the dead man’s body escaping and coating everything, everything, including Maureen.
The shower no longer folds out of the wall. Likely a blessing, since she was shown vid after vid of what to do in case of gravity failure. Showering had not been on the list of things that it was considered wise to do. The toilet is a free-g model, and works no matter the gravity. She blesses the designers, wishing nothing but happiness and soft pleasant things for them.
There are red lights on what passes for a control panel, over the niches that food and water emerge from. They look like blood, and they make her queasy in a way that the weightlessness does not. She demands that the spaceship tell her what is wrong. She does not understand the answer.
“Is there anything I can do to fix you?” she asks. Her voice is shockingly loud.
Contains no user serviceable parts. Service will be called. The computer’s voice thrums. She dislikes the way it tickles the bones just below her ear, the joint of her jaw.
“Service? Are you serious?”
Please rephrase.
“… will service arrive in the near future?”
We will rendezvous with service in approximately one thousand six hundred and four days subjective time, plus or minus fourteen point four days.
Maureen cuts the bottoms off of her spare pants and tapes the fabric to cover all of the red lights. She doesn’t need to bathe anyway. After all, the one person who might smell her is dead and no rose himself.
• • •
Bits of the dead m
an’s face are coming off. These are small enough to put into the waste disposal unit, which recycles them. Recycle them into what, she does not want to know. The food that the spaceship suggests she eat at regular intervals has gone from prefabbed meals that rotate between flavors to a grey mush that tastes like nothing much at all. At least, when it escapes the bowl, it floats in one sticky blob that is easily recaptured.
Maureen has completed three sculptures and placed them into the receptacles where finished works rest, cradled. When her ship meets with the Hippocrene ship, both vessels will extend and entangle proboscis. Her sculptures will go to them, and she will receive whatever the Hippocrene consider a-gift-for-a-giver. She will sell. If she were living in the last century, she would be the most successful artist of her generation, the sculptor that sold to aliens.
She likes the idea of the ships meeting and mating midair (mid-space? mid-orbit?), like insects do in old vids. “Are you excited to meet your soul mate?” she asks the ship. “Or is it more like chemicals, ho hum, time to mate?”
Please rephrase.
The dead man’s head waggles in the netting. The hole where his nose once was is a reproach edged in white. “I know, it’s no use talking to him,” she admits to the dead man. “He never understands me.”
Please rephrase.
“Eat shit and die.”
The computer falls silent. It understands insults.
• • •
Maureen has fed most of the dead man’s body into the recycler. The foul liquid is almost gone; when it leaked from the coveralls, things got very bad. At least the recycler, unlike almost everything else on the ship, is holding up. The air scrubbers were another story. The liquid that had once been the dead man’s body made them stop working for a little while. Maureen curled up in her little cubby of a bunk and pulled the blanket over her head and begged for the horror to stop. Then she got up and followed the spaceship’s insistent instructions about how to clear the filters she could reach.
It appears to have worked. The scrubbers are working again.
She uses the rest of her spare pair of pants to rub down the bones of the dead man. Each bone is inescapably elegant—those curves! The unbearable straightness of the thigh! Why has she never realized the lovely things that ugly human meat covers?
Lightspeed Magazine Issue 49 Page 4
